Cognitive Development in Late Adulthood

Cognitive Processes

• The decline of fluid intelligence is more noticeable in late adulthood

• Accumulated knowledge may compensate to some degree for slower processing speed in older adults

  • This decline is likely due to a decline in overall functioning of the brain and central nervous system

Attention

• Changes in attention are very important aspects of cognitive again.

  • Older adults’ ability to ignore distracting information decreases

• Performance on divided attention and sustained attention tasks only seem to worsen if the task is complex

  • Wisdom and experience may offset some of the decline

• Example: older adults are less likely to get distracted by their phone while driving, than teenagers and young adults

Memory

• researchers have found that…

  • Aging is linked to a decline in explicit memory (the conscious remembering of facts and experiences)

  • Implicit memory (memory without conscious recollection) is less likely to be affected by aging.

• Example: older adults are more likely to forget what items they wanted to buy at a grocery store than they are to forget how to drive a car.

  • Perceptual speed may be slower (in driving), but they will remember how to do it.

Episodic and Semantic

• Episodic memory is the retention of information about the details of our own life.

  • The color of the walls in your childhood bedroom, what your first date was like, what you ate for breakfast today.

• Semantic memory is a person’s knowledge about the world (facts and general information).

  • General academic knowledge, the names of famous people, significance of important dates/places, the meaning of words

  • Most of this knowledge will lack recollection of when/where/how the information was learned

Episodic and Semantic Decline

• Older adults often take longer to retrieve semantic information, but they can ultimately retrieve it.

  • However, the ability to retrieve very specific information (such as names) usually declines in late adulthood.

  • For the most part, episodic memory declines more than semantic memory.

• A common memory problem for older adults is the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon - a cognitive error that occurs when a person is confident that they know a word but can’t say it.

  • They may have partial information about the word: its meaning, grammatical features 9first letter), or sound patterns (“sounds like __”).

Examples of Tip-of-the-tongue tasks

• Picture naming: Showing someone a picture of an uncommon object and asking them to name it

• Defenition-based recall: giving a definition of a word and asking participants to provide the word itself.

• Celebrity naming: presenting a picture of a famous person and asking for their name

• Foreign language translation: asking someone to translate a common word from their dominant language to their less dominant language.

  • If participants cannot recall the word but feel like they are close to remembering it, they are experiencing the TOT phenomenon.

Source and Prospective

• Source memory is the ability to remember where one learned something.

  • Failures of source memory increase with age

• Prospective memory involves remembering to do something in the future.

  • E.g., remembering to take your medication or remembering to run an errand

  • Prospective memory plays a very important role in independent maintenance in late adulthood.

• The decline of prospective memory depends on context.

  • Age-related deficits occur more often in tasks that are time-based than those that are event-based.

    • Remembering to call someone on Friday vs. remembering to ask your friend about the cost of their vacation once they return

use it or lose it

• Mental activities can benefit the maintenance of cognitive skills

  • Reading books

  • Doing crossword puzzles

  • Going to lectures

  • Going to concerts

• Research suggests that enagging in mental exercisies regularly in late adulthood may…

  • Reduce cognitive decline

  • Lower the liklihood of developing specific types of dementia

  • Increase overall life satisfaction and seld-esteem

Work and Retirement

• Cognitive ability is one of the best predictors of job performance in older adults.

• Older workers, in comparison to their younger counterparts:

  • Have lower rates of absenteeism

  • Higher job satisfaction

• Increasing number of adults are beginning to reject the early retirement option.

• On average, those who retire spend 10 years in retirement (compared to the previous generation ~ 25 years in retirement)

Retirement trends

• researchers noted that when people reach their 60s, the life path they follow has become less clear as a population:

  • Some don’t retire, continuing in their career jobs.

  • Some retire from their career work and then take up a new and different jjob.

  • Some retire from career jobs but continue volunteer work.

  • Some move in and out of the workforce (retire, then come out of retirement).

  • Some never really have a ‘caeer” job from which they can retire

  • Some who are in poor health move to a disability status and eventually into retirement.

  • Some are forced into retirement involuntary due to physical or cognitive decline.

  • Some who are laid off define it as “retirement.”

Depression

• Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is an affective, or mood, disturbance that can be accompanied by cognitive difficulties.

  • NOT associated with age or cognitive decline.

  • Mose common and treatable (mood) disorder among older adults.

• Common predictors

  • Earlier depressive symptoms

  • Poor health or disability

  • Loss events

  • Low social support.

Characteristics of Depression in older Adults

• Dysphoria (general feeling of sadness)

• Feelings of helplessness

• Social with drawl

• Insomnia or hypersomnia

• Lack of self-care

• Changes in appetite

  • symptoms must last for more than 2 weeks to rule out “momentary mood changes”

  • Substance abuse or medical reasons must be ruled out

Dementia

• Dementia is a neurotypical disorder in which primarily symptoms involve deterioration of mental functioning.

  • Less than 1% of young-old (65-74) are affected

  • At least 50% of oldest-old are affected

• There are more than 12 forms of dementia that have been identified as of 2017

• Most common:

  • Alzheimer’s Disease

  • Vascular Dementia

  • Dementia due to Parkinson’s Disease

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)

• Alzheimer’s Disease is an irreversible brain disorder characterized by the gradual deterioration of memory, reasoning, language, and (eventually) physical function.

  • Cannot be stopped or cured

• About 50% of older adults with Dementia have AD

• Women ar more likely to develop AD because they live longer than men.

• AD can be diagnosed with mental status exams

Progression of AD

• AD comes on gradually and with a steady downhill progression

• Early-stage patients can exhibit:

  • Moderate memory loss

  • Difficulty planning or solving problems

  • Inability to tell time.

  • Misplacing items very often

  • Confusion with location or navigation

• In later stages, cognitive functions will be severely impaired, and patients may develop aphasia - loss of language (production or understanding).

Parkinson’s DIsease (PD)

• Parkinson’s disease is a chronic, progressive disease characterized by muscle tremors, slowing of movement, and partial facial paralysis

  • Around 1.3% of young-old (65-74) are affected

  • Almost 9% of oldest-old (85+) are affected

• There is no cure for PD, but some treatments exist to help manage symptoms.

• PD affects more males than females.

• Some people with Parkinson’s will develop demential and severe cognitive impairment